"Robert Bly said writing a bad poem before breakfast/every day is a good habit./He did it in honor of his old friend Bill Stafford/(who also did it) after Bill died./The poems were never bad, by the way./They were great./There were a lot of them./You could work on them later, after you ate."

"Sometimes the only way we learn to hold on to our deeper knowing is because a stranger jumps out. Then we are forced to fight for what we find dear-fight to be serious about what we are about, fight to get past our superficial spiritual motives, which Robert Bly calls "the desire to feel groovy," fight to hold on to the deeper knowledge, fight to finish what we have begun."

"I interviewed Robert Bly in 1990. I can remember saying to him, “Now, what about the men’s movement?” And he said, “No, it’s not men’s movement.” And I said, “Well, what will you call it?” “Men’s work, just work with men, that’s all.” And, I really like that. I like that he called it work with men. Mythopoetic is too big a word. It is better to have simpler words."

"Many people boast of going years without a vacation. But this is a sign of trouble — not commitment."

"One of the greatest satisfactions in life comes from getting things done and knowing you have done them to the best of your ability."

"The successful managers know that the best way for their people to learn and grow is through experience and that means taking chances and making errors."

"In my opinion two is the ideal team. Any more and you're in danger of ending up with a committee that spins its wheels and accomplishes nothing."

"You can't literally cram a 25th hour into a 24-hour day. But you can shift activities and priorities so more time is available for essential tasks."

"Without a deadline, the motivation to do a task is small to nonexistent."

"Productive people guard their time more heavily than the gold in Fort Knox."

"Quality improves with effort according to an exponential curve."

"The Angel of Death is the invisible Angel of Life."

"Pierre Trudeau was too much of a professional politician to be described as a good man, nor, it can be argued despite much publicity to the contrary, was he a particularly clever or even wise one. But he was a great man, perhaps the greatest Canada has produced in this century."

"Trudeauism: The Highest Form of Liberalism"

"The modern definition of 'racist' is someone who's winning an argument with a liberal."

"’T is said that absence conquers love; But oh believe it not! I’ve tried, alas! its power to prove, But thou art not forgot."

"The mind does not regulate its own condition. Mental depression, for example, is a state of mind caused by the body. In a cell in the hole it only seems that there is a separation of mind and body - in fact, the body's condition (of deprivation of sensations; experiences, functions, and so on) controls the moods of the mind more than in any other situation I can think of."

"Most important, you learn never to trust a man, even if he seems honest and sincere. You learn how men deceive themselves and how impossible it is to help them without injuring yourself."

"Even European philosophers have taken notice that most of what we take for knowledge is nothing but bias and prejudice."

"The world is amazed at how 'cruel' it is! (This is very funny to think about!) And then, when the 'chips are down' (Sartre's favorite expression), Sartre, who has never gambled but is enamored of the terminology of a kind of daring that doesn't involve getting his ass skinned, 'martyrs' himself. It is the same kind of responsibility anyone takes upon himself by submitting to your bad opinion of him by hanging his head and agreeing with all the accusations - and then, when he has done that, forlornly tells you he is sorry it rained last night, sorry the price of tea went up, etc. etc."

"This world is nothing. An illusion. Death is the release."

"I feel that if I ever did adjust to prison, I could by that alone never adjust to society."

"But a kind of genius can come of this deprivation of sensation, of experience. It has been mistaken as naïve intelligence, when in fact it is empty intelligence, pure intelligence. The composition of the mind is altered. Its previous cultivation is disintegrated and it has greater access to the brain, the body: it is Supersanity. Learning is turned inside out. You have to start from the top and work your way down. You must study mathematical theory before simple arithmetic; theoretical physics before applied physics; anatomy, you might say, before you can walk."

"The intelligence recedes, no more a tool of learning - because knowledge is based on experience - but a tool of the outside world it is deprived of knowing. It tries to contact other minds by telepathy; it becomes the Ancestor. Words and Numbers come to hold mystic significance: they were invented by some arcane magic older than man. The line between the word and the thing vanishes; the intervals of numbers in infinity collapse with infinity."

"Apostolic preaching cannot be carried on unless there be apostolic prayer."

"Preachers are not sermon makers, but men makers and saint makers, and he only is well-trained for this business who has made himself a man and a saint. It is not great talents nor great learning nor great preachers that God needs, but men great in holiness, great in faith, great in love, great in fidelity, great for God - men always preaching by holy sermons in the pulpit, by holy lives out of it. These can mold a generation for God."

"In prayerful sympathy and love. Hold to the old truth -- double distilled."

"God shapes the world by prayer."

"Men of God, before anything else, are indispensable to the furtherance of the kingdom of God on earth."

"Mindfulness is defined as nonjudgmental, investigative, kind, and responsive awareness. This sort of awareness takes intentional training of the mind."

"Those who understand the way it is, rather than the way they wish it were, are on the path to freedom."

"Everything is impermanent—every pleasure, every pain, every body. But the survival instincts crave permanence and control. The body wants pleasure to stay forever and pain to go away forever."

"Recovery is also the ability to inhabit the conditions of the present reality, whether pleasant or unpleasant."

"We would all say that deep down, all we want is to be happy. Yet we don’t have a realistic understanding of what happiness really is. Happiness is closer to the experience of acceptance and contentment than it is to pleasure."

"We could search the whole world and never find another being more worthy of our love than ourselves."

"We must do away with any shred of denial, minimization, justification, or rationalization. To recover, we must completely and totally understand and accept the truth that addiction creates suffering."

"Difficult personalities are a mirror for the places where we get stuck in judgment, fear, and confusion."

"The cause of our suffering has always been our reaction to the thoughts, feelings, cravings, and circumstances of our lives. The cause of our addictions has always been the indulgence in the behaviors or substances."

"While we are in recovery we need to be able to strike a balance between not allowing our ego to do all the talking and not letting our low self-esteem to only present what is wrong with us."

"As we walk the path of Refuge Recovery, we gradually uncover a loving heart."

"If our definition of happiness is "experiencing that which is pleasurable," we are going to be disappointed a lot of the time."

"The next step in the process of liberation is to break this chain reaction of suffering whenever life is unpleasant and feeling content only when life is pleasurable."

"Forgiveness is not just a selfish pursuit of personal satisfaction or righteousness. It actually alleviates the amount of suffering in the world. As each one of us frees ourselves from clinging to resentments that cause suffering, we relieve our friends, family, and community of the burden of our unhappiness. This is not a philosophical proposal; it is a verifiable and practical truth. Through our suffering and lack of forgiveness, we tend to do all kinds of unskillful things that hurt others. We close ourselves off from love, for example, out of fear of further pains or betrayals. This alone—a lack of openness to the love shown to us—is a way that we cause harm to our loved ones. The closed heart lets no one in or out."

"Sitting still is a pain in the ass."

"Experience each moment as if it were the first sensation of its kind ever. Bring childlike interest and curiosity to your present-time experience."

"The most important thing to remember is that we must live in the present, and if in the present moment we are still holding on to old wounds and betrayals, it is in this moment that forgiveness is called for."

"Spiritual revolutionaries must be committed not to what is easiest, but to what is most beneficial to themselves and the world."

"The greatest satisfaction comes not from chasing pleasure and avoiding pain, but from the radical acceptance of life as it is, without fighting and clinging to passing desires."

"Happiness is closer to the experience of acceptance and contentment than it is to pleasure. True happiness exists as the spacious and compassionate heart's willingness to feel whatever is present."

"Everything is impermanent. Every physical and mental experience arises and passes. Everything in existence is endlessly arising out of causes and conditions. We all create suffering for ourselves through our resistance, through our desire to have things different than the way they are - that is, our clinging or aversion."